Welcome to the Roadside

I'm so glad you're here.

I won’t lie—I’ve struggled writing this. Like, over a year, STRUGGLED with writing and starting this thing here on Substack.

I struggle with beginnings, and endings and everything in between. I don’t know where to start because there are too many possibilities, too many in-roads, too many starting lines. And I am a perfectionist and a procrastinator who will choose to rethink, revise, and restart anything and everything without finding the courage to actually just start.

So here we are. I have chosen a starting point. It is imperfect. It is messy. It may not be well-written because I am out of practice. I just have to spit it out and press send and try to leave the overthinking behind. And I can let it be beautiful and perfect in its shakiness and not-feeling-ready-ness. So here it goes—thanks for being here to witness me in all my uncertainty.

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I’ve spent a lot of time stuck on roadsides over the past decade.

This is the reality of riding motorcycles—even more so when older, hand-built bikes are involved. Roadside breakdowns are just a frequent, albeit annoying, probable occurrence. But we choose it, because it’s just part of the fun—the journey.

Ladd and I have taken two long motorcycle trips in the past couple of years. The first was in the late summer of 2020, when the world still felt unsure in the midst of a pandemic. The second, around the same time of the year in 2022, after going through quite a bit of loss and grief. Both times felt ill-advised. Both times we were pretty unprepared, in so many ways. But we did the thing anyways. And they both were beautiful messes, in their own right.

With Ladd being on a bike he built and a peanut tank that can only hold enough gas for 60-ish miles, and one that has parts and pieces well over 50 years old—we spent a lot of the time on the side of the road, broken down, refilling on gas, figuring out the next step. A lot of time spent on roadsides. In the middle of nowhere. In the mountains. In the desert. In the middle of Vegas. At gas stations. At rest stops. At fast food parking lots. At motels. I could go on.

I have watched Ladd MacGyver us out of situations that I definitely thought ended our trip. I’ve watched him do some crazy sketchy shit that I am always convinced will not actually work, and then it does. He’s scrappy like that. Scrappy as in—finding a piece of trash on the side of the highway and somehow using it to get us to the next stop. I will be sharing about all that in the future because they are fun stories.

I’ve learned resilience on the sides of roads. Pushed up against an uncomfortable edge of uncertainty. Will we make it, or are we fucked? It’s usually always been the first, with only a few instances being the exception.

It takes grit. And pushing through the fears.

There have been so many times where I have wanted to give up on these trips, pull over, drop the bike with disgust, and lay down in the gritty asphalt, debris and weeds on the side of the highway. Let something run me over. Take me back to my bed, let me pull the covers over myself, and sleep for the rest of my life. Let this be done.

And yet….

There are moments that make it all worth it. That have made me cry big fat happy tears in my helmet. That have made me scream with joy. That have made me grateful to be alive—breath in my lungs and blood in my veins—alive. On this messy, sad, complicated, beautiful planet. (I’ll be sharing more about those moments in the future, in another issue, because they deserve their own individual post.)

In a sense, trips like these have been reflections of life as a human on this planet. You’re traveling on this path, and then all of a sudden, you have to make an emergency stop, at the edge of your limit, to work through something. To pull the strewn bits and pieces that are all over the highway behind you, back together into something that works, something that can move forward again. Sometimes it resembles the thing that it was before, and sometimes it is entirely new—the old can’t be mended into working again.

I’ve been through more moments like this in the past 2 years than I care to count. Both on the road, and in life.

These moments have stopped me in my tracks. Taken my breath away. Left me wondering what the fuck to do next.

The big ones shatter. Break apart. Cause you to have to excavate your whole existence. Make you realize that you as a person, are built on shoddy scaffolding. Are built on the need to distract from what is difficult. Are built on drinking poison that numbs and makes you forget what you were feeling. Built on escaping everything that is real and that is sharp, and that hurts.

My younger brother died in September of 2021 from an accidental fentanyl overdose. I got the phone call from the coroner’s office and had to call my dad to tell him what had happened. I will be writing and sharing more about this in this space because it is a story I feel I need to tell more fully, in time.

His death shook me violently awake to my own life. I’ve heard this is a common feeling upon losing a loved one, especially when it is so sudden and so unexpected. It becomes clear very quickly just how short time is. How fragile and unstable this human thing can be.

Loss and grief have been a catalyst for change in my own life on a scale that feels unbelievable to me at times. I have moments when I look back at my life before my brother’s death and do not recognize the person I was, or the life I was living.

She was so profoundly lost, had become disconnected from herself and who she was or what she wanted. Placing herself in other’s peoples hands and opinions of what she should do—thinking others knew better. Not listening or trusting herself in any way, shape, or form. Not living in her body—completely disassociated. I was sleepwalking through my life. There, but not really there. Alive, but not really conscious of much of anything.

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I wish I could go back and change things. I wish I could go back and apologize to him. I wish I could go back to late summer of 2021 and not cancel plans I had made with him a few days before he passed. I wish I could go back, fold my brother into a hug and tell him there was a way to feel better, and to deal with the big things I imagine he was running from. I wish I had known what he was dealing with and I wish I had had the chance to help. I wish, so deeply, that he was still here.

But I am forever grateful to him for shaking me awake. For forcing me onto a different path. For helping me realize I had to go back and reprocess most of my life. For helping me realize my own patterns of addiction and numbing. For helping me to move in a direction that feels healthier, and better than before, and truer to who I actually am—and not some version that I thought would be better, or more successful in other peoples eyes.

I am forever grateful to him for saving my life. For helping me get unstuck. For helping me start this new chapter.

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And I am grateful to you—my few readers! Thank you for being here to witness the beginning of this new chapter. For making it through this first issue that has been perhaps a bit cheesy, a bit of a messy jumble, a bit sad.

I am grateful to be seen, even though that is really damn difficult for me. I hear that it gets easier with practice. 🤞🏻

Sending you love,

dins

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